Nate Silver Named Gay Person of the Year by Out Magazine

Nate Silver. If the name doesn’t sound familiar chances are you’ve lived in a wood cabin on a Bolivian mountain for the past six months.

Silver is a writer and statistician who accurately predicted Barack Obama’s reelection using math -- when all the veteran political pundits were leaning on their instincts and experience to label the race "too close to call."

He was so confident on his calculations that he bet MSNBC host Joe Scarborough $2,000 that Obama would win re-election. Call him cocky, but he was right. And in the process this gay geek from Michigan revolutionized the way elections are called in advance.

It is exactly for this that Out Magazine has named Silver "Person of the Year." Silver spoke with the magazine about politics, his work ethic, and the future of his blog, FiveThirtyEight, hosted by The New York Times.

He also talked about his sexuality. The 34-year-old, who came out to his parents after a trip to London to study economics, said he wasn’t "excessively" bullied during his high school years, and maintained a low profile by immersing himself in fantasy baseball leagues or the debate program.

While Silver supports gay marriage, Out writes that he "worries that growing acceptance of gays will dent our capacity to question broader injustice."

"For me, I think the most important distinguishing characteristic is that I’m independent-minded," he told Out Magazine. "I’m sure that being gay encouraged the independent-mindedness, but that same independent-mindedness makes me a little bit skeptical of parts of gay culture, I suppose."

He adds: "To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight," and says his sexuality doesn’t play a bigger role on his life than other aspects.

"I don’t want to be Nate Silver, gay statistician, any more than I want to be known as a white, half-Jewish statistician who lives in New York."

Leave it to a six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald to add some major theatrics to the scene playing out over social media in response to Republican Indiana Gov. Mike Pence's signing of a "license to discriminate" bill Thursday.